| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| A GOP lawmaker in the House of Representatives dies, meaning that the GOP majority has now shrunk to the bare minimum. | ||
| President Trump continues aggressive action against Venezuelan illegal oil shipments. | ||
| Plus, we bring on Alex Clark of Cultural Apothecary to talk about a major Supreme Court case. | ||
| And we're joined by Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana to talk about everything going down in Venezuela. | ||
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| Well, it is an off-year election this year. | ||
| That means that President Trump is not, of course, on the ballot. | ||
| And so his coattails will really not apply to House Republicans or Senate Republicans. | ||
| And that means an uphill battle for Republicans because, again, the incumbent party in off-year elections tends not to do particularly well. | ||
| Right now, Republicans are running the barest majority humanly possible in the House of Representatives. | ||
| That is thanks to the untimely death of Republican Representative Doug Lamalfa. | ||
| He represented a district in Northern California for 13 years. | ||
| He passed away at 65 years old. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, his death further shrinks the already thin House GOP majority to 218 to 213. | ||
| Of course, Representative Marjorie Taylor Green, who wants to run for president herself and seems to be running an anti-Trump campaign, formerly resigned from the House in the middle of her term this week. | ||
| So there are now four empty seats, two in red-leading districts, two in blue districts. | ||
| Also, Representative Jim Baird of Indiana was in a car accident, so he is sidelined at least temporarily, which means that in terms of who's going to show up, you are now down to 217. | ||
| Then you also have people like Thomas Massey, who routinely vote against the president of the United States, and now you're down to 216. | ||
| And so your majority, your workable majority, is shrinking into the arena of unworkability. | ||
| If you're a Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, you always had a very, very tough job. | ||
| Now that job is becoming nearly impossible. | ||
| And so the question becomes: how does President Trump, how do Republicans somehow get something done this year that allows them to claim victory heading into 2026? | ||
| Well, one thing the president is trying to do is pressure some of these erstwhile Republicans to do his bidding. | ||
| That, of course, includes Thomas Massey. | ||
| The president was slamming Thomas Massey yesterday. | ||
| Everybody loves him. | ||
| I would say there's one person he's given up on. | ||
| I mean, I think he just gave up on this guy. | ||
| He's so bad. | ||
| He never votes for us. | ||
| But no matter how good, he won't vote for us. | ||
| There's a sickness there. | ||
| There's something wrong. | ||
| You can have the greatest bill, the greatest for the country. | ||
| Forget about for Republicans. | ||
| Great, great, great for the country. | ||
| I'm going to no vote. | ||
| We don't even bother calling him a three in the morning, do we? | ||
| Well, you know, again, taking a look at the workable House majority right now, it is pretty much unworkable. | ||
| So, what exactly is the plan going forward? | ||
| Well, you have a few things. | ||
| One, yes, foreign policy wins actually do matter. | ||
| I know that there is this idea that what happens on the foreign policy front doesn't help presidents at all or their parties. | ||
| That is eminently untrue. | ||
| Now, what really hurts is foreign policy losses, but foreign policy wins can help at the margins. | ||
| That is particularly true if you are targeting political constituencies that are drifting away from you. | ||
| So one of the things about the Trump constituency that is really quite fascinating is that obviously in 2024, he had an outsized blue-collar white vote, but he also radically overperformed with Hispanic Americans. | ||
| There's a case to be made that what he is doing in places like Venezuela, possibly Cuba, is going to have an outsized impact on voter turnout in 2026, particularly in some of the swing states. | ||
| President Trump is trying to get his base jazzed up. | ||
| He spoke at the House Republican retreat yesterday, and he told Republicans that he's given them a roadmap to victory. | ||
| And I think I gave you something. | ||
| It's just a roadmap, and it's a roadmap to victory. | ||
| You have so many good nuggets. | ||
| You have to use them. | ||
| If you can sell them, we're going to win. | ||
| Because we've won two races in like 50 years. | ||
| It's for whatever reason, I don't know why, but just don't fight it. | ||
| It doesn't make sense. | ||
| There have been two, and they were unusual circumstances. | ||
| So whether it's a Republican or Democrat, whoever wins the presidency, the other party wins the midterm. | ||
| And it doesn't make sense because we've had the most successful year probably in the history. | ||
| They say, and now you add what happened essentially yesterday, we've had the most successful first year of any president in history. | ||
| Now, again, I think there's a lot to that. | ||
| The president of the United States does have a booming stock market. | ||
| The president of the United States has a bunch of foreign policy wins under his belt. | ||
| Doge is targeting waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| And that is now filtering down to the state level, which we'll get to in a little while. | ||
| Of course, the stakes are very high because if Democrats were to win the House of Representatives, basically the Trump agenda stops dead at that point. | ||
| As President Trump put it, we need to win or we are going to be in a world of hurt. | ||
| These things are so important because you guys got to get elected. | ||
| Because if you don't get elected, we have a country that's going to go to hell. | ||
| So we can't play games. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, the sun will rise tomorrow. | ||
| And when it rises, we will all, we don't need this. | ||
| We need to talk about favorite nations. | ||
| And your numbers are coming down at levels that nobody's ever seen. | ||
| We inherited high prices. | ||
| We inherited a mess. | ||
| We inherited the greatest inflation in history. | ||
| And you know what was knocking it down? | ||
| The bad economy that we inherited. | ||
| We inherited bad. | ||
| We now have the hottest economy in the history of our country. | ||
| When President Trump says that if the Republicans do not win the midterms, he will undoubtedly be impeached. | ||
| He is likely right about this. | ||
| Although I will say that I think the Democrats are being a little smarter in their approach to politics than they were during President Trump's first term. | ||
| They seem to have now recognized that needlessly knocking their head against the wall is actually a bad strategy. | ||
| I'm not so sure that President Trump gets impeached the minute that the Democrats take over the House. | ||
| I think that they do start investigating everybody in Trump's orbit. | ||
| I think they start ruining lives inside Trump's orbit. | ||
| They did that during Trump number one. | ||
| But here's President Trump basically saying that everything stops dead. | ||
| You got to win the midterms, because if we don't win the midterms, it's just going to be, I mean, they'll find a reason to impeach me. | ||
| I'll get impeached. | ||
| We don't impeach them. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because they're meaner than we are. | ||
| We should have impeached Joe Biden for 100 different things. | ||
| They are mean and smart, but fortunately for you, they have horrible policy. | ||
| They can be smart as can be. | ||
| But when they want open borders, when they want, as I said, men and women's sports, when they want transgender for everyone, bring your kids in. | ||
| We're going to change the sex of your child. | ||
| Just send them our way. | ||
| In some cases, like in Minnesota, they don't even tell the parents. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| And nobody believes it when I say, I think we have six states. | ||
| Nobody, am I correct? | ||
| Okay, Tom Emers said yes. | ||
| But it's true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where the kid comes back, they keep the kid. | |
| They operate on the kid. | ||
| They don't tell the parents. | ||
| It's not believable. | ||
| We have great, solid common sense policy. | ||
| They have horrendous policy. | ||
| What they do is they stick together. | ||
| They never have a no vote. | ||
| Now, what President Trump is doing here, obviously, directing his campaign, directing Republicans against the woke excesses of the left. | ||
| Obviously, that was a big winning issue for him in 2024 at the House Republican Leadership Conference here. | ||
| He went ho-hog on this. | ||
| Here he was making fun of men weightlifting against women. | ||
| And you see, I want to be more, but I have somebody watching. | ||
| I want to be more effusive. | ||
| I want to really. | ||
| But she gets in the drops the thing, walks off the stage crying. | ||
| Her mother's crying. | ||
| Her father's crying. | ||
| Guy gets up. | ||
| He said, have you lifted before, little bit? | ||
| And he walks up being, he could have gone ging, ding, ding, ding. | ||
| I think it was 112 pounds, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's crazy. | |
| Okay, so he's right about this. | ||
| But one of the things that Republicans, I think, are not going to be able to count on, because again, they are the party that is in power, not the party that is out of power. | ||
| One of the things that they're not going to be able to count on is Democrats being stupid. | ||
| I think Democrats are getting less stupid. | ||
| They have lost a series of elections. | ||
| It has not been good for them. | ||
| And now they seem to be jettisoning some of their worst baggage, including the trans issue. | ||
| You do not hear Democrats talking about the trans issue as the social rights issue of our time, the civil rights issue of our time anymore. | ||
| They just don't do it. | ||
| You don't hear them talking about DEI anymore. | ||
| Instead, they are refocusing on quote unquote affordability, right? | ||
| This is the thing that they are focusing in on over and over and over again. | ||
| And you can see why, because they believe that that is essentially their only winning path right now, because affordability, as I've said before, is a mushword. | ||
| No one ever thinks things are affordable. | ||
| Very few people in their entire life have thought, hey, things are so affordable right now. | ||
| Maybe when your income goes up, things become, quote, affordable for you. | ||
| But affordability is a subjective measure. | ||
| It is not an objective measure. | ||
| So even though President Trump can look at the inflation statistics and say it was up at 9, 10% under Joe Biden, it is down at 2%, 3% under me, people still understand that the prices are higher now than they were in, say, 2019. | ||
| And so things are quote unquote unaffordable. | ||
| And so even though President Trump is winning victories in, for example, Venezuela, which we'll get to in a moment, Democrats are refocusing on affordability. | ||
| According to Politico, Democrats hoping to win higher office this year are seizing on President Trump's intervention in Venezuela to push a twist on one of his campaign promises, America first. | ||
| Former Senator Sherrod Brown, who's running to reclaim his seat in Ohio, said Ohioans are facing higher costs across the board and are desperate for leadership that will help deliver relief. | ||
| We should be more focused on improving the lives of Ohioans, not Caracas, meaning Venezuela. | ||
| The frame from Democrats, according to Politico, shows how potent the party views affordability as an issue in the midterms, one that President Trump and his team have grown increasingly preoccupied by after across-the-board losses in 2025. | ||
| Longtime Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, who's a former spokesperson for Hillary Clinton, said the problem Trump was already having was he looked like he was focused on everything other than what matters in people's daily lives. | ||
| And now he has just supercharged that. | ||
| Now, again, I do not think that Americans are under the impression that we cannot, as a country, walk and chew gum at the same time. | ||
| With that said, there is a line of attack here that Republicans are going to have to use, and they're going to have to use it often. | ||
| And that is that the amount of fraud, waste, the amount of abuse of the system that is inherent in a bigger government, Democratic administration everywhere from Minnesota to New York City, that is what is going to crush affordability for you. | ||
| That is the thing Republicans are going to need to focus on. | ||
| And it works. | ||
| One of the things that's been fascinating is to watch the collapse of Tim Walz in Minnesota. | ||
| Now, again, Minnesota is a very blue state. | ||
| There's been an attempt to proclaim that it's a purple state. | ||
| It's not particularly purple. | ||
| It's been a long time since Minnesota went Republican. | ||
| It is a blue state. | ||
| And Tim Walz just had to declare that he would not run for reelection again. | ||
| And he had to declare that because of the extraordinary amount of fraud that existed in his blue state. | ||
| Now, when you connect that to the immigration policy pursued by Democrats, that is a toxic combination for Democrats. | ||
| One of the reasons that the fraud in Minnesota has captured the minds of so many Americans is because it does appear to be members of a community who have been imported into the United States, who have not assimilated into American practices and who are then bilking the rest of the taxpayers in Minnesota. | ||
| When you combine those two things, that is a toxic brew for Democrats. | ||
| Their immigration policy combined with welfare fraud is a toxic brew and it exists across the spectrum. | ||
| It is not just in Minnesota. | ||
| It is in New York. | ||
| It is in California. | ||
| Republicans need to focus extraordinary fire on this particular issue because it's not just enough to unleash Doge and say waste, fraud, and abuse have to be cut. | ||
| You have to actually connect it with Democratic policy. | ||
| And you have to connect it to something that Republicans have been loath to connect it to for a while, which is the size of government. | ||
| We'll get to the size and scope of government and why that needs to become a Republican argument. | ||
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| See, when I was growing up, being a conservative meant that you were against the expansion of the size and scope of government. | ||
| Nowadays, it seems in vogue for Republicans to be in favor of that expansion, but at the same time to want to quote unquote cut that waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| Well, that's not a great argument because inherent in a bigger government is waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| And when you combine that with loose immigration policy, the way Democrats have, you end up with Minnesota. | ||
| As the Wall Street Journal points out, defendants allegedly set up sham businesses and falsely claim to provide meals to children, pay kickbacks to parents to enroll kids without autism and autism treatment, build Medicaid for phony housing services to addicts, among other scams. | ||
| 90 of the defendants who are charged of those 90, over 80 of them were of Somali origin. | ||
| These issues are not relegated to Minnesota by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| Again, they are inherent in the size and scope of government and the expansion of the welfare roles and of our immigration roles, particularly with regard to either claims of asylum or illegal immigration itself. | ||
| It turns out, as always, that a Scandinavian social model can only exist temporarily as long as you don't crush capitalism and in combination with strong border control. | ||
| And Democrats have pursued weak border control, no controls with regards to waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| And the result is what's happened in Minnesota. | ||
| And that bears political fruit. | ||
| That's why Tim Walz is no longer going to be running for that third term in the state of Minnesota. | ||
| And again, good news for Republicans. | ||
| This stuff exists across the board. | ||
| Over in New York, Zorhan Mamdani, of course, has appointed a person to lead his tenancy department. | ||
| And that person, the leader of the mayor's office to protect tenants, a person named C. Weaver, who we discussed yesterday on the show. | ||
| She's causing a crisis in New York government. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, because she has openly talked about racial discrimination and private property seizures, the need to collectivize private property. | ||
| I mean, this is a target-rich environment for Republicans. | ||
| If you want to talk about affordability, you know what makes things unaffordable: people bilking other taxpayers out of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. | ||
| The government cracking down on private property ownership and preventing the building of new housing units, by the way, because of things like rent control. | ||
| Zorhan Mamdani is sticking with her. | ||
| Here's Zorhan Mamdani defending C. Weaver, a person who has spent the last several years on Twitter railing against basically the existence of white people and in particular, rich white people. | ||
| Have you ever rented an apartment in New York only to find yourself not just paying rent, but application fees, amenity fees, credit score checks? | ||
| In a city filled with old buildings that could use some tender-loving care, some landlords are taking advantage of the housing market to gouge tenants with outrageous fees, all while leaving them trying to survive in homes with collapsing ceilings and sinking floors. | ||
| It's time for that to change. | ||
| We need a citywide crackdown on rental ripoffs. | ||
| We need to take on the indignities from those landlords who demand more than their fair share. | ||
| That's why our administration is organizing a series of rental ripoff hearings in every borough. | ||
| This is a chance for you and your neighbors to speak directly with us about how you're getting ripped off. | ||
| For the first time, our city is bringing this discussion directly to you. | ||
| And it's only just the start. | ||
| We're excited to share more information about these hearings soon. | ||
| In the meantime, start taking notes so you can share with us how you're getting ripped off. | ||
| So come complain and then attack your landlord. | ||
| You think that's going to contribute to affordability in any way? | ||
| Harmeet Dillon, who, of course, runs the civil rights division over at the DOJ. | ||
| She talked about C. Weaver and the fact that this is a violation of federal law, the sort of discrimination she's been talking about. | ||
| Quote: We have several federal statutes that explicitly protect people of all colors and all different kinds of backgrounds and military status and so forth from the exact kind of land grabs and reallocation and redistribution being promised in New York. | ||
| Mamdani put out a statement: quote, We made the decision to have C. Weaver serve as our executive director for the mayor's office to protect tenants to build on the work that she has done to protect tenants across the city. | ||
| We were already seeing the results of that work. | ||
| Really, they're already seeing the results. | ||
| Incredible how the results are already seen. | ||
| In 2021, C. Weaver argued the state can, quote, further decommodify housing and land by canceling rents outright and shuttering eviction courts. | ||
| Now, again, you want to talk about affordability? | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| This is an argument Republicans absolutely should have about affordability because of the fraud in places like Minnesota. | ||
| By the way, how deep is the fraud in Minnesota? | ||
| Incredibly, a person named Abu Khar Dahir Asman, according to Breitbart.com, the permanent representative of Somalia in the United Nations, is actually linked to a home healthcare agency in Cincinnati, Ohio that was prosecuted for Medicaid fraud. | ||
| You have permanent representatives of foreign countries in the United States linked to Medicaid fraud in American domestic states. | ||
| Apparently, Osman had ties to progressive health care services allegedly, that is a home healthcare company plagued by a Medicaid fraud investigation. | ||
| HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neill confirmed that Osman is in fact linked to that particular business and that the federal agency previously took action against the company after a conviction for Medicaid fraud. | ||
| This, again, is a place where Republicans certainly ought to drill down. | ||
| So when it comes to the affordability issue, obviously Republicans do have some room to run, given the fact that you have people like Zorhan Mamdani or Tim Walz or Say Gavin Newsom in California who radically want to expand the size and scope of government while maintaining an open border system that increases the possibility of huge fraud. | ||
| And those sorts of stories are very damaging to Democrats. | ||
| Now, where Democrats are really fighting back on the affordability issue has to do, obviously, with that Obamacare cliff, the time bomb that was placed by Joe Biden in expanding Obamacare subsidies to people earning four times the poverty level of the United States, to people who really did not need Obamacare subsidies. | ||
| But when those subsidies went away, you saw a radical escalation in the price of Obamacare for people, particularly who are elderly or people who are on family plans under Obamacare. | ||
| So President Trump yesterday was speaking at this House Republican leadership conference, and he suggested that when it came to Obamacare, we should let those subsidies continue to expire. | ||
| We should just put money directly into health savings accounts for people and then allow those health savings accounts to be used in order to pay off not just the deductible, but also to pay off the premiums. | ||
| You can own healthcare. | ||
| Figure it out. | ||
| Let the money go directly to the people. | ||
| It goes in a healthcare account. | ||
| There are numerous things you can do, but you have to let no money for the insurance companies. | ||
| Okay, now, here's the problem with this particular line. | ||
| This is a problem. | ||
| The problem for this particular line is that the insurance companies actually are not making that much money. | ||
| Just on a profit level, the insurance companies are not making that much money because of the extraordinary regulations that they have to go through in order to work with the federal government. | ||
| The fact is that Obamacare consolidated the industry pretty radically. | ||
| Obamacare forces young people who want insurance to get comprehensive coverage as opposed to catastrophic coverage as a sort of backdoor subsidy to elderly people who they group together. | ||
| The Obamacare coverage, it has not bent the cost curve in any material way. | ||
| Costs are still up on Obamacare. | ||
| And again, those subsidies have been rising radically. | ||
| The problem, of course, is that when you hit that cliff, the amount that the Trump administration is talking about putting in HSAs is probably not going to compensate the people who really, really need the help. | ||
| Right now, the average annual deposit that Trump is talking about, $1,000 annual deposit, that's insufficient to cover the premium increases, particularly for people who are elderly and people who have families. | ||
| The average premium increases under Obamacare that just kicked into place are like $1,000 a year. | ||
| So you think, okay, $1,000 a year in the HSA, $1,000 a year increase, those cancel each other out. | ||
| But the problem is that that's unevenly distributed because the high-end premium increase can be over $12,000 per year for older couples or families. | ||
| The average bronze deductible is $7,476. | ||
| People are spending above and beyond their premiums, obviously. | ||
| So what is probably the best case solution, at least in the short term, to get us through the midterms, if you're not going to do a full-scale restructure of Obamacare, which is what Republicans should have been pursuing when they had a much larger majority in Congress during Trump's first term? | ||
| Well, since they didn't fix it then, they're not going to fix it now. | ||
| The proposal that's being put forth by Bernie Moreno of Ohio and Susan Collins of Maine is a two-year Obamacare extension of the subsidies in order to prevent that cliff from just destroying a huge number of Americans' livelihoods. | ||
| It would require enrollees to pay $25 per month to do away with zero premium plans because those zero premium plans where people basically are just handed Obamacare for free, that is rife with fraud. | ||
| You can just apply and then not take advantage of it and just take the money home, basically. | ||
| It would reintroduce the subsidy cliff, meaning if you make $200,000 a year, you don't get the subsidy. | ||
| It would toughen identity and income verification and remove current caps on how much an individual has to pay back to the IRS. | ||
| If you estimate that your income is going to be X and it turns out to be 2X, then you have to pay money back to the IRS. | ||
| So it crops out a bunch of people who are taking advantage of the system. | ||
| That may be the best available solution if the goal is not to get absolutely clobbered in 2026, because this is what Democrats are going to focus on from now all the way to the election. | ||
| So what's the advice for 2026 for Republicans? | ||
| Focus in, yes, on affordability, but they should be focusing in on what Democrats would do if they gained power, radically expand government, which radically expands fraud, which radically expands waste, and which radically increases cost. | ||
| Then there's what Republicans have to not do, and that is follow every rabbit hole. | ||
| Vivek Ramaswamy, who's running for governor of Ohio right now, has a great piece over at the Wall Street Journal pointing out that social media is a trap for politicians, particularly Republican politicians, get sucked into the maw of social media and start talking about nonsense that nobody cares about. | ||
| He says, my campaign team will still use social media to distribute messages and videos on my behalf, but I won't browse any of it myself. | ||
| There's a fine line between using the internet to distribute your message and inadvertently allowing constant internet feedback to alter your message. | ||
| That isn't using social media. | ||
| It's letting social media use you. | ||
| He says modern social media is increasingly disconnected from the electorate. | ||
| The messages you're most likely to see are the most negative and bombastic because they are the most likely to receive rapid likes and reposts, which, of course, drives revenue for social media content creators. | ||
| And he points out the online polls politicians glean from social media is increasingly manufactured by foreign actors and non-human bots. | ||
| He is right about this. | ||
| Republicans have to avoid chasing rabbit holes. | ||
| Stop going down every rabbit hole. | ||
| We don't need more discussions about Curtis Yarvin's fascist proposals from politicians. | ||
| We don't need politicians talking about the vagaries of quote-unquote, what is an American in a way that is likely to both alienate voters and not achieve anything substantial. | ||
| And by the way, avoid the topic entirely. | ||
| So avoid all of that would be one recommendation. | ||
| And meanwhile, on the foreign front, yes, foreign victories do matter. | ||
| The president of the United States, the seizure of Maduro, and now the continued seizure of tankers fleeing Venezuela. | ||
| So Russia has been playing a game in which they re-flag a bunch of what are called ghost ships. | ||
| They reflag a bunch of ships that don't have a flag on them and claim they're Russian ships to try and prevent the United States from stopping illegal oil tankers coming from Venezuela. | ||
| Well, it's not working. | ||
| The Trump administration said no. | ||
| The U.S. this morning seized two oil tankers on Wednesday, including one that had fled a U.S. blockade of sanctioned vessels near Venezuela and was actually being escorted by a Russian submarine and a Russian Navy ship in the Atlantic. | ||
| Helicopters and at least one Coast Guard vessel south of Iceland were used to take control of that tanker, formerly known as Bella One, that had eluded the United States for more than two weeks. | ||
| Apparently, the Russian submarine had been communicating with the tanker over the past three days, and President Trump was not going to be deterred. | ||
| He was not going to pretend that this was the hunt for Red October, and we have to avoid the Russian subs. | ||
| The idea was this is an illegal tanker. | ||
| It is carrying oil that is in international waters. | ||
| And no, we are not going to allow the Russians to pretend that this is a Russian ship. | ||
| The Bella One had begun sailing under a Russian flag in recent days. | ||
| It had changed its name. | ||
| It was being escorted by Russian military vessels. | ||
| The Coast Guard took it anyway, which, again, this is great for American deterrent power. | ||
| It is excellent. | ||
| That is a very, very good thing, good for the president of the United States. | ||
| The president also announced yesterday that Venezuela would be immediately selling us 30 to 50 million barrels of oil. | ||
| He put out a statement on Truth Social quote. | ||
| I am pleased to announce that the interim authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 million barrels of high-quality sanctions oil to the United States of America. | ||
| This oil will be sold at its market price. | ||
| That money will be controlled by me as president of the United States to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States. | ||
| I've asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan immediately. | ||
| It will be taken by storage ships and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States. | ||
| Thank you for your attention to this matter. | ||
| Would not surprise me in the slightest if that amount of oil sold off at market prices was used to subsidize the rebuilding of the Venezuelan oil industry under American auspices, which is probably the best use of that money at this point. | ||
| That is not enough oil, by the way, to markedly lower the global price in any serious way. | ||
| 30 to 50 million barrels of oil, 50 million barrels of oil represents one-sixth, perhaps, of Venezuelan total output on an annualized basis. | ||
| America is so oil-rich that that represents somewhere between three and five days of American produced oil. | ||
| So, how about the polling? | ||
| There have been a lot of people on both the horseshoe left and the horseshoe right suggesting this is wildly unpopular. | ||
| It's just terrible. | ||
| How could we possibly do this? | ||
| The American people don't approve. | ||
| And the answer is actually the American people are pretty split. | ||
| It's kind of one-third, one-third, one-third. | ||
| According to the polling, basically one-third of Americans support the ouster. | ||
| One-third of Americans disapprove of the action because Trump did it. | ||
| And one-third have no opinion. | ||
| And if you have no opinion, you're not against it. | ||
| So that kind of falls more. | ||
| Here's the rule with President Trump. | ||
| If you ain't against him, then you're kind of for him. | ||
| You may not want to say it, but that's the rule. | ||
| If it's one-third pro-Trump, one-third anti-Trump, one-third in the middle, that one-third in the middle is much more likely to be quietly pro-Trump than to be. | ||
| There's no such thing as quietly anti-Trump in America. | ||
| It just doesn't exist. | ||
| Quietly anti-Trump is not a thing. | ||
| And again, people are sort of holding off because they want to see what happens next. | ||
| Understandable. | ||
| Totally get it. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| We don't know what's going to happen next. | ||
| However, I seriously doubt that the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and the President of the United States, Donald Trump, decided that they were going to arrest and extradite Maduro without any plan for what comes next. | ||
| That obviously is not true. | ||
| Meanwhile, where are the American people on this? | ||
| Well, according to Harry Enton over at CNN, 50% of Americans favor Maduro being tried as opposed to just 14% who oppose. | ||
| They simply put don't like Nicholas Maduro. | ||
| And in fact, they believe that he should be on trial for drug trafficking. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| 50% of Americans favor compared to just 14% who oppose. | ||
| So there are very few Americans here who oppose it. | ||
| Even among Democrats, the opposition number is below, get this, just 24% is below 25%. | ||
| So this is something that unites Republicans. | ||
| It divides Democrats. | ||
| And at this particular point, support for the operation way up. | ||
| And in terms of those who favor the drug trafficking trial for Maduro, that is a clear plurality. | ||
| He doesn't really even divide Democrats on the idea of a trial. | ||
| They all seem to support it by and large. | ||
| Only 24% oppose it for Democrats. | ||
| Now, again, these are not terrible numbers for the president of the United States. | ||
| As far as people on the right who are suggesting there is a rift in the GOP over this, no, there's not. | ||
| No, there's not. | ||
| As always, as always, the isolationists on the right and the horseshoe right anti-Americans, they're just wrong. | ||
| They don't represent a large percentage of Republicans. | ||
| It wasn't true with Iran. | ||
| It's not true with Venezuela. | ||
| Here's Harry Ensign explaining. | ||
| Let me be very clear. | ||
| There is no rift in the Republican Party. | ||
| Yes, there are some folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massey who are quite skeptical of this. | ||
| They are very much in the minority. | ||
| What are we talking about here? | ||
| Well, why don't we just talk the GOP on the U.S. military out to Maduro? | ||
| Hypsos, 65% support, 6% opposed. | ||
| How about the Washington Post poll? | ||
| 74% support, just 10% opposed. | ||
| If you look among 2024 Trump supporters, we're talking about 80% support. | ||
| The vast, vast majority of Republicans are with Donald Trump on this issue. | ||
| Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene are very much in the minority. | ||
| Very few Republicans are with him. | ||
| Hey, so again, all of this talk about how Trump is splitting his own base, it's always not true. | ||
| It is not true. | ||
| This is why the entire attempt to say there's an America first program that Trump is betraying, he's betraying his base. | ||
| No, Make America Great, again, is Donald Trump's movement. | ||
| People trying to seize that movement are delusional and dishonest. | ||
| And that is perfectly obvious in every poll that is taken of Republicans on all of these issues. | ||
| Well, joining us on the line to discuss is Senator Tim Sheehy. | ||
| He is a combat veteran and Trump entrepreneur and junior U.S. Senator from Montana. | ||
| Of course, he served as a Navy SEAL officer and team leader, deploying to Iraq, Afghanistan, South America, and the Pacific region. | ||
| Senator, thanks so much for taking the time. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Great to see you, Ben. | ||
| So let's talk about what the Trump administration and the U.S. military just pulled off an astonishing operation. | ||
| The capacity to launch within, apparently, hours, a gigantic sortie in the air, taking out whatever air defense had to be taken out and then putting people on the ground with zero casualties to take the leader of another country and arrest him and extradite him to the United States is an extraordinary thing. | ||
| What do you make of it? | ||
| That was fantastic. | ||
| I mean, listen, for those of us who come from the special operations community, we've long known that we have these capabilities, and it's wonderful to be able to see them exhibited like this. | ||
| It's obviously a solemn duty to do anything that involves taking the lives of others or putting your life at risk. | ||
| But this is exactly what our special operations task forces were designed to do. | ||
| And what a lot of folks don't know is the history of where special ops came from. | ||
| And there was a mission not unlike this called Eagle Claw in 1980. | ||
| That was an abject failure where we attempted to rescue our hostages out of Iran, being held in the embassy there. | ||
| That message was a failure. | ||
| That mission was a failure. | ||
| And as a result, we created the very capable task force that Americans saw execute this mission last weekend. | ||
| And they just said it was a resounding success. | ||
| So I'm incredibly proud of our troops for doing so. | ||
| I'm proud of the president and grateful for the president for making this decision to finally take this criminal out, a criminal who wasn't just a drug dealer or narco-terrorist, but acted as a regional hub for the worst rogue regimes and terrorist groups in the world. | ||
| As you know, Venezuela was not just a narco-terrorist state. | ||
| It also served as money laundering, logistics hub for literally a laundry list of every single bad actor in the world, from North Korea to Iran, to China, to Russia, to worst of all, money laundering for groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthi rebels. | ||
| They allowed their ghost fleet and oil reserves to be used as a global financing hub for the worst of the worst. | ||
| And this was a great thing for the world. | ||
| You know, Senator, it has been astonishing to watch many of the people who criticized President Trump in term one over not doing what they thought was enough about Maduro, now criticizing him for taking Maduro out of power in Venezuela. | ||
| I want to get to what comes next, but the hypocrisy of many of the people who are now signing into chat to talk about violations of international law and how horrible all of this is, it's pretty astonishing. | ||
| It's laughable. | ||
| It would be funny if it wasn't so disgraceful. | ||
| I mean, this is the same party, of course, whether it's Chris Murphy or Zorwan Momdani, that demand that Benjamin Netanyahu be arrested. | ||
| They're lombasting arresting a foreign leader for crimes when every single day they call for the arrest of Netanyahu as a war criminal. | ||
| So they demand that we arrest other heads of state. | ||
| These are the same party that tried to arrest our own head of state, Donald Trump, and depose him from power. | ||
| So they clearly don't have a problem arresting or indicting or going after heads of state because they've been doing it all the time. | ||
| So spare me this bullshit where they're like, how dare we touch the head of state of a foreign country that's so off their reservation, it's so not allowed, which is what they've been advocating for, specifically Maduro. | ||
| As you know, Chuck Schumer himself stood on the Senate floor five years ago and demanded that Trump do more to unseat Maduro. | ||
| So the simple fact is this is politics, plain and simple. | ||
| I wish they would not play politics with the lies of Americans because Maduro's regime, obviously, because it predated Maduro, as Chavez before him, actively illicit, supported the illicit networks that kill Americans every day, tens of thousands of them, by pushing fentanyl and cocaine into our country, by funding these Marxist movements within our own country that are constantly trying to tear our own government down and create unrest within the strongest economy and the strongest democracy in the world. | ||
| So this guy was a bad actor. | ||
| His entire regime had been bad actors for the last 30 years. | ||
| And the Democrats themselves have said so. | ||
| So my hope is for the good of the country and the good of the world, that they will eventually come around on this. | ||
| But as we know, Trump during syndrome is a very serious disease and they haven't been cured from it yet. | ||
| Yesterday on the show, Senator, I made the case that President Trump, I think, has ended the Iraq syndrome. | ||
| So we had the Vietnam syndrome, which was the idea that America was a bad actor in the world, that America ought to retreat from the world. | ||
| And then under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, that came to an end with targeted military action in places ranging from Grenada to Panama to the first Gulf War. | ||
| After the Iraq war, after the Afghanistan war, there seemed to be an Iraq syndrome in American politics, the idea that American force abroad used in any way was somehow going to lead to hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground, gigantic quagmires, and that America was a negative force in the world. | ||
| Twice in the last year, the president has used targeted military actions to effectuate extraordinary change. | ||
| And it feels as though the Trump administration has put the Iraq syndrome to bed in a way. | ||
| I would agree. | ||
| And in many ways, you know, foreign policy, of course, is constantly an evolving ecosystem of ideas and policies and actions. | ||
| And I think throughout American history, we've seen various phases of foreign policy, of engagement, of isolationism, of the decision of whether we will engage in global affairs and whether we won't. | ||
| And if we do, how we do so. | ||
| And I think you're absolutely right, Ben. | ||
| We're turning the page now to a new era that actually harkens back to kind of our original foreign policy playbook in the early days of our founding republic that said, listen, yes, we have formed our republic to get away from the ills of the old world and we don't want to get sucked into old world conflicts. | ||
| But at the same time, we recognize we must stand up for ourselves. | ||
| And the earliest conflicts we fought as Americans were the Barbary Wars of the Mediterranean, where we saw that our commerce was threatened, our sailors were being impressed. | ||
| And we said, you know what, we're going to take targeted action. | ||
| And as a young nation in 1798 through 1805, you know, we took targeted action very much like this, where we went into specific locations from Tripoli to Morocco, from Gibraltar, all through that region to protect our citizens and our national interest. | ||
| And that's what this comes back to, Ben. | ||
| As you well know, as Mark Aruby, who's done an amazing job. | ||
| I mean, those of us who've known Marco, of course, have known this all along, but the rest of the nation is now finally seeing just what a genius this guy is and how lucky we are to have him at the top of our foreign policy construct because what we're seeing is actions being taken for our national interest. | ||
| And believe it or not, Ben, that's the job of our government is to do things that are good for America and good for Americans. | ||
| And this was good for America. | ||
| It was good for the American people. | ||
| And frankly, it was good for the world. | ||
| So I think you're absolutely right. | ||
| This phase of foreign policy we're seeing is a targeted campaign of specific actions that have limited scope, but have very intentional outcomes. | ||
| And those outcomes are what we're seeing in Iran now, which with everything in Venezuela, what folks are not seeing is, as you all know, riots in the streets in Tehran. | ||
| Tehran is at the weakest point it has been in in 46 years since the Ayatollah took over in 1980. | ||
| We are finally seeing that this other terrible, murderous regime is finally on the rocks. | ||
| A years of sanctions through our good friends and allies in Israel, targeted strikes to disable their capabilities, of course, the Midnight Hammer mission and other things, quite simply like the drought that has starved Tehran of the ability to sustain population. | ||
| So there's a combination of factors that have put yet another murderous regime at a tipping point. | ||
| And it's not an accident we got there. | ||
| It's because the very focused policies of Secretary Rubio and the president here are taking our adversaries and letting them know that we're not going to sit there and let them constantly stab us in the back and undermine our republic. | ||
| You know, Senator, one of the things that's fascinating is obviously what comes next in Venezuela. | ||
| There's apparently street gangs who have been going around threatening people. | ||
| These are people loyal to Maduro have been threatening folks. | ||
| Obviously, Delsi Rodriguez, who's the vice president, who has now taken over as the leader, she is under the thumb of the U.S. military. | ||
| There's a lot of wondering about is that a long-term relationship? | ||
| Is she going to eventually transition to democracy? | ||
| What does that look like? | ||
| Obviously, we're on like day four of this thing. | ||
| And the decision that was made by the Trump administration was clearly that we're not going to put hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground in Venezuela. | ||
| We're going to use the forces available to us. | ||
| And then we're going to put such extraordinary pressure on the current regime that they're forced to essentially do our bidding. | ||
| That seems to be the way that things are unfolding so far. | ||
| What do you make of the plan thus far? | ||
| Well, that's exactly right. | ||
| And thank you for reminding folks it's day four. | ||
| Cause I mean, even on Sunday, it was laughable to hear all of our critics out there, you know, oh my God, there's no, it's not stabilized. | ||
| We don't have a functioning democracy in Venezuela. | ||
| It's like, it's been 24 hours. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| It took us, you know, 15 years to get a constitution in place in America, 1775 to 1789. | ||
| It's going to take some time to stabilize this. | ||
| It's not going to be perfect on day four. | ||
| And to your point, actually, to go back to kind of the Iraq doctrine, which listen, we all know that there were mistakes made and being someone who served there. | ||
| Trust me, I understand that. | ||
| But what also gets lost in the history is Iraq actually became quite a functional place relatively quickly. | ||
| And if Barack Obama had not pulled us out in 2011 to just fill a shallow campaign promise, we were on a pretty good track there. | ||
| And ultimately, Iraq is on a better track now. | ||
| But I think with Venezuela, as far as next steps, Rubio, Stephen Miller, the president, are very focused on that. | ||
| And what they didn't do specifically, Ben, was regime change. | ||
| They didn't go in and bomb out the regime and turn Venezuela into a parking lot and drop 300,000 troops in and establish a provisional government. | ||
| That's exactly what they did not do. | ||
| What they did do was arrest a criminal, remove him from power and said to the existing regime, listen, we don't really like you very much, but here's the four corners of the expectations that we will have around you. | ||
| We're going to continue to sanction you. | ||
| We're going to continue to put guardrails around your ability to destroy a fabric of our nation with drugs and criminal activity, mass migration into America. | ||
| We're going to put a box around you and set expectations for your actions. | ||
| And if you violate those expectations, there'll be further consequences. | ||
| And I think you said very clearly, they said very clearly yesterday they expect elections to take place because as you all know, this regime was defeated in elections two years ago. | ||
| And the Machado movement very clearly was preferred by the Venezuelan people. | ||
| And I think there's been demands that why don't we just parachute them in to take over? | ||
| Well, the reality is the regime is not loyal to them. | ||
| The bureaucracy is not in place to conduct that kind of a change. | ||
| And to do that regime change that everyone's accusing us of would invite the kind of stability that we're instability we're all trying to avoid. | ||
| So I think it's very important that we use the existing regime to the extent possible in a transition period to where we can effect a change in government that will reflect the democratic values of the Venezuelan people. | ||
| Who, by the way, everyone demonstrating in the streets that's happy about this are, guess what? Venezuelans. | ||
| All the people who are against it are all like, you know, the white liberal college kids, you know, who yesterday were marching for Palestine and Hamas. | ||
| Today they switched out their Kafiyas for sombreros and now they're marching for Maduro. | ||
| It's ridiculous that this is a shallow astroturf movement paid for by Roy Singen, who's hiding out in China using his capitalist-earned fortune to fund communist exercises in America from anti-Semitism to, of course, now ridiculous opposition to us taking out a drug dealer. | ||
| So I think the next phase is going to be, of course, complex. | ||
| This is going to be a delicate time. | ||
| And I'm just thankful we have Secretary Rubio there who's going to carry out the president's vision and get us the other side of this. | ||
| Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana. | ||
| Senator, thanks so much for your time and your insight. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks, Ben. | ||
| Take care. | ||
| Speaking of dishonest, I have to say that the New York Times takes the cake this morning for a piece talking about how China is now going to take advantage of what happened to Maduro in order to expand its own power. | ||
| Quote, the speed with which U.S. forces acted to capture Mr. Maduro sent a blunt message to Beijing about the limits of its influence in a region Washington treats as its own. | ||
| China now risks losing ground in Venezuela after Saturday's assault in Caracas, despite decades of investment and billions of dollars in loans. | ||
| But the assault also reinforces a broader logic that ultimately favors President Xi Jinping's vision of China and its status in Asia. | ||
| When powerful countries impose their will close to home, others tend to step back. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| The idea that China has been waiting around to see whether the United States would be aggressive in Venezuela to determine whether to be aggressive in Taiwan, or that the lesson they're going to take away from the United States being aggressive in Venezuela is that the United States will not act to defend allies in Taiwan is this is insipid. | ||
| It's totally insane. | ||
| It is an absolute projection. | ||
| If you think China is sleeping easier tonight because Donald Trump decided to do what he just did to Nicholas Maduro, you're out of your mind. | ||
| It is just untrue. | ||
| It is ridiculous on its face. | ||
| Now, meanwhile, there are other dictators all over the world who are a little bit worried. | ||
| So in Iran, things are getting incredibly spicy. | ||
| Yesterday, there was chaos in Tehran's Grand Bazaar, right? | ||
| This is the capital of Iran. | ||
| And there are reports that there are certain cities, particularly in the border areas of Iran, that have essentially already fallen to many of the people who no longer want to live under the thumb of the Ayatollah. | ||
| Here's some of the video from the Grand Bazaar in Tehran. | ||
| That's a lot of people out there. | ||
| Protesters are being fired upon, by the way, by the Iranian forces. | ||
| Large crowds have been demonstrating in Iran, in Bajnord, which is in the country's northeast. | ||
| Again, certain areas of the country are becoming very, very difficult to govern for the Ayatollah. | ||
| Shiraz is apparently now the victim of security forces being heavily deployed across multiple parts of the city. | ||
| Huge numbers of people out in the streets. | ||
| So the Iranian regime may be in trouble. | ||
| Now, as I've said before, the only real force in Iran that has the power to govern is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. | ||
| There's the Iranian military. | ||
| The IRGC is sort of the praetorian guard for the Ayatollahs. | ||
| But if there is somebody inside that infrastructure who wants to do the same thing that just happened in Venezuela, I am sure that that would be fairly easy to effectuate. | ||
| Crowds are out in the streets. | ||
| They are not happy. | ||
| And this is not going to let up, it seems, because Iran's centralized government does not seem to have the wherewithal, the power, or the will to actually just start shooting people en masse. | ||
| They're afraid that President Trump might do something like what just happened in Venezuela. | ||
| Trump has, of course, openly threatened the Iranian regime if they start shooting people in the streets. | ||
| Meanwhile, closer to the West, President Trump's obsession with Greenland continues apace. | ||
| So the other day, President Trump suggested that we need Greenland. | ||
| I'm just going to point out right now that under a current treaty that we have with Denmark, we actually have the ability to build kind of whatever bases we want in Greenland. | ||
| So we should probably just do that. | ||
| If we want to buy Greenland, great. | ||
| Apparently, they don't want to sell Greenland. | ||
| Denmark doesn't want to. | ||
| Harry Truman tried to. | ||
| He tried to offer Denmark $100 million in gold back in 1946 for Greenland. | ||
| And Denmark was like, nah, not so interested. | ||
| Right now, it would actually be illegal for Denmark to just sell Greenland because they have a level of home rule and self-government. | ||
| A referendum would likely not result in Greenland joining the United States, which I don't understand the logic there. | ||
| If you're a member of the Greenland population, it seems to me you should damn well want to join the United States. | ||
| You have a choice between independent Greenland and being part of the greatest country on the planet by far, being under the protection of the U.S. military and also benefiting from our magnificent free market system. | ||
| And it seems to me that would be a better use of time. | ||
| But, you know, I'm not from Greenland. | ||
| I'm not, you know, unlike Fezwick from the Princess Bride. | ||
| I'm not from Greenland. | ||
| But apparently they don't want to join. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We're not going to go grab Greenland, but President Trump enjoys talking about it. | ||
| I will say this about Greenland. | ||
| We need Greenland from a national security situation. | ||
| It's so strategic. | ||
| Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. | ||
| We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. | ||
| And Denmark is not going to be able to do it, I can tell you. | ||
| Okay, so, you know, again, this idea that we're going to grab Greenland, I don't think so. | ||
| But Stephen Miller does enjoy going on cable TV and being very aggressive about his approach to places like Greenland. | ||
| It has been the formal position of the U.S. government since the beginning of this administration. | ||
| Frankly, going back into the previous Trump administration, that Greenland should be part of the United States. | ||
| The president has been very clear about that. | ||
| That is the formal position of the U.S. government. | ||
| Right, but can you say that military action against Greenland is off the table? | ||
| You're going to need military action against Greenland. | ||
| Greenland has a population of 30,000 people, Jake. | ||
| The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? | ||
| What is the basis of their territorial claim? | ||
| What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark? | ||
| The United States is the power of NATO. | ||
| For the United States to secure the Arctic region to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously Greenland should be part of the United States. | ||
| So, you know, it'll be interesting to see how all this plays out. | ||
| Doesn't mean that the United States is about to invade Greenland. | ||
| I have serious, serious doubts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| In other news, the Health and Human Services Department has now overhauled the childhood vaccine schedule, trying to mirror countries, apparently more like Denmark, Japan. | ||
| There's been an attempt in the media to portray this as a gigantic revamping cut to vaccine guidance that people are being told not to take crucial childhood vaccines. | ||
| Actually, it just changes the advice with regard to, for example, hepatitis A, flu shots, rotavirus. | ||
| And the idea is that now you should go talk to your healthcare provider, your clinical decision maker, as opposed to guidance that you should just get it sort of automatically. | ||
| According to American Academy of Pediatrics President Andrew Racine, he said, at a time when parents, pediatricians, and the public are looking for clear guidance and accurate information, this ill-considered decision will sow further chaos and confusion and erode confidence in immunizations. | ||
| Okay, I mean, saying go talk to your doctor about those ones, well, still maintaining, by the way, that kids be vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, polio, whooping cough, tetanus, diphtheria, and HPV. | ||
| You know, that also for chickenpox. | ||
| That does not seem like a massive, massive change to me. | ||
| They're not saying don't take the vaccine. | ||
| They're saying go talk to your doctor about the vaccine schedule. | ||
| Again, pointing out Denmark, Germany, and Japan as pure developed nations with slimmer schedules. | ||
| Again, the best sort of counter argument that I've seen seems to be Americans are too dumb to understand that you should go talk to your doctor and say they just won't take things unless the doctor tells them to take it. | ||
| The reality on a practical level, most doctors are going to tell people that they should give it to their kids. | ||
| That is the reality because doctors are trained in medical school and they know medicine. | ||
| And so doctors tend to be quite pro-vaccine as a general rule because they understand also how herd immunity works. | ||
| Joining me on the line to discuss this and more is Alex Clark. | ||
| She's host of Culture Apothecary, a health and wellness podcast produced by Turning Point USA. | ||
| And of course, she's a leading activist in Maha, the Make America Healthy Again movement. | ||
| Alex, thanks so much for taking the time. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| I really appreciate it because there's a lot going on, Ben. | ||
| So let's talk about what's going on. | ||
| We don't tend to cover Maha probably as much as we should here on the program. | ||
| What do you think are the big wins delivered by RFK Jr.'s Health and Human Services Department thus far? | ||
| Man, so far, I mean, there's a lot. | ||
| Obviously, we ban food dyes. | ||
| We are looking into what's involved in baby formula ingredients that are allowed there. | ||
| There's supposed to be a very big announcement happening this week. | ||
| We're thinking on the dietary guidelines. | ||
| They've brought back the presidential fitness test in elementary schools. | ||
| That's really going to kind of culturally transform how we think about health at, you know, a huge level when you're talking about, you know, teaching children about these issues. | ||
| So there's a lot that we've done, but there's a really, really big thing happening at the Supreme Court this Friday that's very important. | ||
| Okay, so let's talk about that. | ||
| What is happening at the Supreme Court? | ||
| Yeah, so this should actually really matter to every American family, especially parents. | ||
| And this is why people should be paying attention. | ||
| So on Friday, the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear a case brought by Bayer. | ||
| Bayer is the company that owns Monsanto and sells Roundup. | ||
| And so the question at stake is, do American families still have the right to hold chemical companies accountable when their products make people sick or not? | ||
| And Bayer wants the court to give them immunity from lawsuits. | ||
| They're arguing that if the EPA approved their product label, then no one should ever be able to sue them for failing to warn, even if people get cancer, even if new science comes out, and if kids are harmed. | ||
| And so if the court agrees, this wouldn't just apply to Roundup. | ||
| What's really important for you to understand is that this would apply to over 57,000 pesticide products currently on the market. | ||
| So we're talking about weed killers. | ||
| We're talking about bug sprays, ant traps, disinfectants, chemicals used in homes, backyards, schools, playgrounds, chemicals that many families, your family might assume are safe because they're sold at the store and they don't have a warning label. | ||
| So the part that makes this even more disturbing is that the EPA approved Roundup without a cancer warning based on science that we now know was fraudulent. | ||
| So one of the key studies that the EPA relied on was ghostwritten by Monsanto. | ||
| Their own internal emails prove it. | ||
| And just recently, that study was officially retracted in the last month. | ||
| So Bayer is asking the Supreme Court to protect them using an approval that was based on fake science. | ||
| And that should really stop everybody cold because when real people, juries, were allowed to hear the full truth, they overwhelmingly held Monsanto responsible. | ||
| Five appellate courts upheld those verdicts because juries saw what regulators didn't. | ||
| They saw that Monsanto never tested the actual Roundup formula for long-term cancer risk. | ||
| They saw internal emails where Monsanto scientists admitted, you can't say that Roundup doesn't cause cancer. | ||
| We haven't done the testing. | ||
| They saw evidence showing that Roundup absorbs through the skin and that matters for kids because parents are spraying Roundup on playgrounds, on lawns, around swing sets. | ||
| Kids are running barefoot. | ||
| They fall. | ||
| They crawl. | ||
| You know, their skin is thinner. | ||
| Their bodies are still developing. | ||
| There's no warning on the bottle telling parents that this chemical can soak through skin or that it's been linked to cancer or that it could disrupt hormones during critical developmental windows. | ||
| It can actually affect sexual development in the womb and cause genital abnormalities. | ||
| So it can really also affect child's fertility later in life. | ||
| And if parents walked into a store, Ben, and they saw a label that said warning, linked to cancer, absorbs through the skin, not safe for children, a lot of them would put it right back on the shelf. | ||
| And so that's the point. | ||
| Bayer has billions of dollars on the line. | ||
| They know that informed consent changes behavior. | ||
| And so instead, they're wanting the Supreme Court Friday to say that once the EPA signs off, even if that approval was based on manipulated data, that companies will be untouchable. | ||
| Even if new evidence emerges, kids are going to pay the price. | ||
| And so this is bigger than one company. | ||
| What the American people need to understand is that if Bayer wins, this opens the door to immunity for all 57,000 pesticide products regulated under federal law that are linked to cancer, Parkinson's, infertility. | ||
| It would even protect foreign companies, chemical companies, Chinese manufacturers selling products in the United States that are banned in their own country. | ||
| So we are potentially looking, Ben, at the United States government awarding immunity for bio-terrorism. | ||
| So the claim in this case is about, I guess, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. | ||
| Again, this is when the federal government gets involved, things get very messy. | ||
| They have labeling requirements under what's called FIFRA. | ||
| And I guess the question at issue here is whether FIFRA preempts state tort claims, because what we're talking about here is really not whether it preempts warning labels on the state level. | ||
| It's whether you got damaged by the thing and you can now sue in state court and whether this act preempts. | ||
| It'll be interesting to see. | ||
| As you say, the circuits have been a little bit split on this. | ||
| The Supreme Court has not been active on it. | ||
| It'll be interesting to see how that case comes down, but it is a very, very important case because, again, the question is whether the duty should be on the companies to ensure their products are safe or whether as soon as they've gotten some sort of stamp from the federal government, now they're good to go and do whatever they want, essentially. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this is a big deal because if you remember, we basically have been through this before, but with vaccines. | ||
| So back in the 80s, you know, it was ruled that you can't sue vaccine companies if you're injured. | ||
| This is what the chemical companies are wanting to do to the American people now. | ||
| And it's a very big deal. | ||
| And the reason they're doing this is because they have millions and millions of dollars in lawsuits that are on the line right now that they don't want to be responsible for. | ||
| And we did have a huge win this week. | ||
| Congress explicitly said that EPA registration is not a defense against failure to warrant claims. | ||
| So they knew regulators rely on company submitted data and they know that state courts exist to catch what regulators miss, especially when companies lie. | ||
| So, you know, this case would blow that safeguard up. | ||
| And point blank, the message this could potentially send is terrifying. | ||
| If you deceive regulators well enough, you're protected. | ||
| If families get hurt too bad, if children absorb toxic chemicals through their skin, there's no accountability. | ||
| That isn't conservative. | ||
| That's not pro-family. | ||
| That isn't pro-freedom. | ||
| It's corporate immunity at the expense of informed consent. | ||
| And so the question in front of the court this week is really not complicated. | ||
| It's do we reward fraud or do we protect families? | ||
| Because once accountability is gone, safety is going to completely disappear. | ||
| And American parents deserve better than that. | ||
| So if the Supreme Court decides that fake science and weak labels matter more than informed consent, then they're telling American parents that their children's health is negotiable. | ||
| And I believe that is a line that we should never cross. | ||
| And I believe that is truly Maha. | ||
| And limited government was never supposed to mean unlimited immunity for corporations that lie and hurt families. | ||
| And I know that you agree with that. | ||
| I know. | ||
| No, I mean, bizarrely enough, this actually isn't a limited government issue. | ||
| It's actually the government trying to protect things that normally would not be protected. | ||
| That's the part that's sort of astonishing is that what we're talking about here is a federal act that would preempt normal sort of state level activity. | ||
| And so what you're talking about is growth of federal government actually crowding out the kinds of answerability that you're asking for. | ||
| The Maha movement, as you've talked about, is also obviously much more than just the federal government. | ||
| It is now extended to the state level. | ||
| A number of states just a few days ago enacted snap bans on soda, candy, and other foods. | ||
| There are five states that have done that. | ||
| I know you've testified in front of the Arizona legislature about that particular issue. | ||
| Where do we stand on that? | ||
| Because that is a big one. | ||
| I mean, the fact is that a huge number, particularly of low-income people in the United States who are reliant on food stamps, are using those food stamps to buy food for their kids or for themselves that really unhealthy sponsored by the taxpayer, which then lead to all sorts of health issues down the line that putting aside the difficulties of the person suffering the health issue also tosses more cost at the taxpayer because then we end up paying for the medical care. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, listen, we've all all week, we've been talking about, you know, little Somalia or whatever and all the fraud that's going on there and how taxpayers are subsidizing them. | ||
| Taxpayers should also not be subsidizing the obesity epidemic, right? | ||
| So that's essentially what's going on when you have the American Beverage Association and people lobbying and saying, you know, it's really imperative that soda is on snap. | ||
| This hurts poor people. | ||
| Poor people, there's no rule that says like they have to be drinking sugary soda. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| What we should be subsidizing is healthier food options, organic food options. | ||
| And I know that's something that Bobby Kennedy has talked about immensely and something that we're working towards. | ||
| But I'm very proud that so many states have stepped up and said, we're not going to have soda on SNAP. | ||
| That's another huge Maha win. | ||
| And, you know, there's stuff that with vaccines, we just announced that we're taking the childhood recommended vaccine schedule from over 70 down to, I don't know, what is it, 11 this week? | ||
| That was a massive win from President Trump that I think a lot of people were kind of wondering if he was going to be able to do that. | ||
| And he did. | ||
| So there's a lot of good stuff with this administration. | ||
| And there's a lot of stuff that we need to be keeping our feet to the fire on. | ||
| And, you know, the thing with the Supreme Court is they don't really care about public opinion, right? | ||
| They're appointed for life. | ||
| And so noise from the public doesn't usually matter. | ||
| But what could matter is us getting loud online and talking about the fact that if they do choose to do this hearing with Monsanto, that it is based on completely fraudulent science about how safe glyphosate is, that was all redacted. | ||
| So that's the thing that we should be talking about because that could make its way to the hill and kind of alert people there. | ||
| So that's why it was really important for me to bring that up. | ||
| Well, that's Alex Clark. | ||
| She's host of Culture Apothecary. | ||
| Go check out her podcast everywhere. | ||
| It's produced by TP USA. | ||
| Alex, thanks so much for the time and the updates. | ||
| Thank you, Ben. | ||
| All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now. | ||
| We'll get into the latest with regard to Ukraine, where negotiations continue. | ||
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|
unidentified
|
What was it like, Marlon, to be alone with God? | |
| Is that who you think I was alone with? | ||
| Mardin, I knew your father. | ||
| I am yet convinced that he was not of this world. | ||
| All men know of the great Taliesin. | ||
| You are my father. | ||
| Other gods should war for my soul. | ||
| Princess Garris, savior of our people. | ||
| I know what the Bull God offered you. | ||
| I was offered the same. | ||
| And there is a new pirate work in the world. | ||
| I've seen it. | ||
| A god who sacrifices what he loves for us. | ||
| We are each given only one life, Singer. | ||
| No. | ||
| We're given another. | ||
| I learned of Yezu the Christ, and I have become his follower. | ||
| He's waiting on a miracle, and I think you can give him one. | ||
| Trust in Yezu. | ||
| He is the only hope for men like us. | ||
| Fate of Britain never rests in the hands of the Great Light. | ||
| Great Light, Great Darkness. | ||
| Such things mattered to me then. | ||
| What matters to you now, Mistress of Lies? | ||
| You, nephew. | ||
| The sword of a high king. | ||
| How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to wield? | ||
| Still clinging to the promises of a god who has abandoned you. | ||
| I cannot take up that sword again. | ||
| You know what you must do. | ||
| Great light, forgive me. |